Foresight Diagnostics Announces the Hiring of Sandra Close, Ph.D., as Chief Operations Officer

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Apr 04, 2022, 09:13 ET

Strategic operational and regulatory expert strengthens company mission to deliver best-in-class liquid biopsy minimal residual disease (MRD) solutions

AURORA, Colo., April 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Foresight Diagnostics today announced the hiring of Sandra Close, Ph.D., as Chief Operations Officer (COO). Sandra brings extensive experience in delivering drugs and diagnostics, with a focus on organizational structure, business strategy, and quality and regulatory requirements. Dr. Close has served as an executive leader in both diagnostic and pharmaceutical companies, including at ArcherDX/Invitae and Eli Lilly, among others.

"Sandy has been guiding pharmaceutical and biotechnology corporations to successful development of novel technologies and regulated products for many years," said Jake Chabon, Ph.D., co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Foresight Diagnostics. "She shares our vision of transforming cancer management by providing sensitive tools to detect and monitor cancer that will improve patient outcomes. Sandy has been supporting Foresight in a consulting capacity during which we have made great strides. Needless to say, we are excited that she will be joining our executive team to lead the scaling of the organization as we commercialize our best-in-class MRD platform, PhasED-Seq. With Sandy's leadership, we are well-positioned to deliver our technology platform to meet the needs of cancer patients and clinicians, worldwide."

Sandra previously served as Chief Diagnostic Strategy Officer at ArcherDX/Invitae where she led efforts to advance an NGS-based molecular diagnostic platform for genetic mutation detection, including MRD products. Previously Sandra also served as Chief of Integrative Science & Collaborative Research for BioStatistics Solutions, Inc., Chief Scientific Officer at Arrogen, and as a Research Advisor at Eli Lilly & Company. Her expertise in regulatory standards and submissions for drugs, diagnostics, medical devices, and clinical laboratory services has fueled the development and subsequent commercialization of multiple innovative technologies resulting in improved patient care.

"Foresight Diagnostics is a biotechnology company focused on patients first. I'm excited to take part in refining the business strategy and creating the corporate infrastructure as we move the organization towards regulated products," said Sandy. "Here, at the forefront of MRD testing, I look forward to delivering a novel technology to market that will provide patients and providers actionable information earlier in the course of treatment, resulting in improved patient outcomes and a paradigm shift in personalized approaches to cancer treatment."

About Foresight Diagnostics
Foresight Diagnostics is a privately held cancer diagnostics company and CLIA-registered laboratory. The company has developed a novel liquid biopsy testing platform for the measurement of minimal residual disease (MRD) that is significantly more sensitive (with a detection limit below 0.0001%, or one part-per-million) than existing tests. The improved sensitivity of the Foresight lymphoma MRD assay can provide actionable information to physicians and biopharmaceutical companies to enable more personalized treatment approaches for patients with B-cell malignancies. Foresight is also developing an MRD assay for other tumor types based on the same technology. For more information, please visit foresight-dx.com and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About PhasED-Seq
The Foresight MRD platform is based on the Phased variant Enrichment and Detection by Sequencing (PhasED-Seq) technology. PhasED-Seq lowers the error profile of mutation detection in sequencing data by requiring the concordant detection of two separate non-reference events in an individual DNA molecule. By detecting more than one mutation, PhasED-Seq can more accurately distinguish tumor-derived cell free DNA (i.e., ctDNA) from healthy cell free DNA – enabling detection of ctDNA at levels below one part-per-million (<0.0001%). PhasED-Seq has been extensively validated in hundreds of patients with B-cell lymphomas.

Contact Foresight
Name: Mukul Agarwal
Phone: 720-443-3658
Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Foresight Diagnostics